Peatlands are often discussed in the context of fires and the haze, but are also a meaningful part of the conversation about the climate crisis in an already too-hot planet.

Haze has been a chronic problem for Southeast Asia over nearly three decades. Reporting ASEAN talks to Dr Helena Varkkey about how the conversation around haze, and fires that cause them, is changing and the challenges to ASEAN’s management of a touchy issue.

At a time of rising living costs, these two farms’ ways of organic farming and producing food offer ideas around greater self-reliance and living with nature, instead of just taking from it.

Indonesia has big plans for cutting its reliance on coal. But these appear overambitious – and are quite distant for a local community that has been breathing air with coal dust for years.

In this podcast, two Filipino scientists say that more data are needed to make conclusions about changes in their number and frequency – but that more intense events are making up a bigger percentage of these typhoons.

Complicated histories and relations among Myanmar’s diverse ethnic communities make the goal of a federal union a daunting one. But possibilities emerge from a new governance forum set up in line with this federal future in Sagaing, the heartland of resistance by the Bamar ethnic majority – and a region that used to be free of conflicts that ethnic regions have been living with.

The Mekong Dam Monitor provides documented data that describes how dam operations – China has the largest ones – are disrupting the healthy balance and unique character of the Mekong river system. Climate change introduces more uncertainty into the equation.

The scorching Thai summer has the writer adopting ways to make the heat a tad gentler – and makes her notice how different communities, from security thinkers to scientists, singers to meditation teachers, share many similar insights about how to restore some balance in planetary life.

Julieta Coro, a mother of 11 children who lives with her family close to the sea in Siargao island, recalls how they took shelter from super typhoon Odette’s destruction in December 2021.

One year after super typhoon Odette pummelled scenic Siargao island in December 2021, locals in the Philippines’ surfing capital –  the site of international surfing competitions – are bent on making their hometown stronger, better and an even more popular tourist haven. Still, there is nervousness about the changing behaviour of storms amid climate change.

The vice mayor of the Siargao town, Romina Rusillon Sajulga, recalls how the community put a diarrhoea outbreak under control in the days after super typhoon Odette hit one year ago.

School’s back. But Siargao’s education sector is recovering not only from COVID-19 but from the devastation of Odette – at a time when the reality of having more powerful storms in the climate emergency continues. “We don’t have typhoon drills,” says a local teacher.

These drawings reflect kids memories’ of the massive destruction caused by super typhoon Odette in their hometown, the Philippine island of Siargao.

Filipinos are the most worried about climate change, given the high risk for disasters that their country faces. But a regional survey shows that they are not necessarily aware of the country’s climate policies, such as its lack of a net-zero target.

Cambodia prepares its first submissions for a natural world heritage site – a dolphin conservation area in Kratie province – and a geopark at a wildlife sanctuary in Mondulkiri.

HO CHI MINH CITY | 19 September 2022 At first, it seemed it would take forever to find an electric vehicle (EV) user in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly or still widely known as Saigon. In June, I sent out a bunch of messages to try to find someone who is using an EV, but […]

Many university campuses have reopened in the Philippines, which until August 2022 had among the longest school closures in the world. As students mix in-person with remote-learning classes, they wonder how their pandemic-era education will shape their future.

The May release of a giant stingray back into the Mekong’s deepest waters in Cambodia made headlines, but threats to the Mekong persist. Several Irrawaddy dolphins in Cambodia have died. The last one in Laos, living in a Lao-Cambodia deep pool, died in February.